The nation’s fiscal path is suddenly and squarely on the fall campaign issues menu. President Obama this week committed his budget office to releasing a plan for the first $109 billion of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts scheduled for early 2013. The release coincides with the end of the Democratic convention and start of the 60-day sprint to Election Day. Until now, sequestration has come up only in the Senate race in defense-dependent Virginia.

The wrap-up of the Olympics reinstates the presidential race as a national spectator sport. Recent polls show the President leading Governor Romney by single digits outside the margin of error. Chicago believes the weight of a seven-month-long effort to define Romney will hold Romney below the threshold; Boston believes only the final three months of campaigning will matter. Kantar Media’s CMAG estimates that two-thirds of an expected $1.1 billion in presidential TV advertising has yet to air.

Romney’s selection of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate guarantees debate over the nation’s fiscal future through the context of entitlement reform. Ryan’s 2011 proposal to transform Medicare from a defined benefit to a defined contribution system was seized upon by Democrats and weakly defended by Republicans when it was introduced. With no doubt as to Democrats’ eagerness to revive the issue, the question is whether Republicans will embrace it more effectively this fall.

A pro-Obama super PAC dedicated to attacking Romney’s work at Bain Capital set off a firestorm that caught the President’s campaign off-guard with a TV ad featuring a former steelworker blaming Romney for his wife’s fatal illness.

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri gambled with an ad campaign boosting the weakest of her three potential Republican challengers who went on to secure the GOP nomination last Tuesday. McCaskill’s and Senate Democrats’ overall odds are just marginally improved.